OS Authentication

OS authentication allows Oracle to pass control of user authentication to the operating system. Non-priviliged OS authentication connections take the following form.

sqlplus /
sqlplus /@service

When a connection is attempted from the local database server, the OS username is passed to the Oracle server. If the username is recognized, the Oracle the connection is accepted, otherwise the connection is rejected.

This article presents the configuration steps necessary to set up OS authentication on UNIX/Linux and Windows platforms.

First, create an OS user, in this case the user is called "tim_hall". In UNIX and Linux environments this is done using the useradd and passwd commands.

On Windows, local users are created using the Computer Management dialog (Start > Programs > Administrative Tools > Computer Management), or domain users can be created in Active Directory.

Next, try to connect to Oracle as an OS authenticated user. We expect this to fail! It may be necessary to set up a few environment variables so that SQL*Plus works correctly. Under UNIX or Linux you would expect something like the following.

In both cases, the connections failed because we have not told Oracle the users are OS authenticated. To do this, we must create an Oracle user, but first we must check the value of the Oracle OS_AUTHENT_PREFIX initialization parameter.

As you can see, the default value is "ops$". If this is not appropriate it can be changed using the ALTER SYSTEM command, but for now we will use this default value.

Now we know the OS authentication prefix, we can create a database user to allow an OS authenticated connection. To do this, we create an Oracle user in the normal way, but the username must be the prefix value concatenated to the OS username. So for the OS user "tim_hall", we would expect an Oracle username of "ops$tim_hall" on a UNIX or Linux platform.

The situation is complicated slightly on Windows platforms as the domain or machine name forms part of the username presented to Oracle. On Windows platforms you would expect an Oracle username of "OPS$DOMAIN\TIM_HALL" for the Windows user "tim_hall".

As you can see, the database servers in both environments are now configured to allow the user "tim_hall" to connect using OS authentication.

If you prefer to have no prefix for the oracle user you need to set the OS_AUTHENT_PREFIX parameter to null (empty string). The ALTER SYSTEM syntax doesn't cope well with zero length strings, so you have to make the change the long way.